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Could my institution get into legal hot water if we were to make copies of blank Scantron sheets? If so, are there good free alternatives for machine readable bubble sheets?

Fomite
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Rajano
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    You should ask your institution's lawyers. If you go ahead and do it, and then Scantron sues you for billions of dollars, saying "But someone on the Internet said it would be okay!" is not going to save your job. – Nate Eldredge May 07 '14 at 16:58
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    On another note, have you actually tried photocopying one as a test and trying it in your scanner? You'll probably need rather heavy paper (or the machine may jam). And for all I know there is some kind of magic ink on the official forms. It's hard to imagine that Scantron won't have taken technical steps to prevent people using third party or copied forms, since they make money selling them. – Nate Eldredge May 08 '14 at 00:11
  • @NateEldredge In my limited experience, in these cases the only answer that comes from university lawyers is "no". The primary imperative is CYA. – Federico Poloni Sep 30 '17 at 08:11

2 Answers2

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The scantron forms and similar forms are not subect to copyright. US Copyright Office Title 37: Patents, Trademarks, and Copyrights §202.1 Material not subject to copyright. (c) Blank forms, such as time cards, graph paper, account books, diaries, bank checks, scorecards, address books, report forms, order forms and the like, which are designed for recording information and do not in themselves convey information.

So to answer your question, no. As long as the school or university doesn't photocopy the actual scantron sheets from Scantron. inc. But it's not illegal for them to create their own version of the scantron sheets that can be readable by the official Scantron machine itself.

Plus, there are numerous companies, not even associated with Scantron. inc. in any sort, That sell scantron compatible sheets for cheaper prices than the 'official' scantron sheet. Amazon and eBay are full of them. So, yeah...

Magpie
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  • If, as a blank form, it is not subject to copyright, why would it still be an infringement to directly photocopy it, rather than making a compatible version from scratch? – interfect Oct 21 '22 at 15:43
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Yes, there are some open source alternatives. Scantron's software and hardware is proprietary.

Moriarty
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  • This doesn't really answer the question of whether the actual sheet of scantron paper may be copied. And as I understand it, the request for open alternatives was for the sheets themselves, not the software and hardware for reading them. – ff524 May 07 '14 at 16:51
  • Well, this is my not-a-lawyer guess: I suspect that photocopying their paper would be illegal. But if you buy their paper from a store, you could probably use open source software to process it. Perhaps there are some terms and conditions somewhere that have a definite answer. – Moriarty May 07 '14 at 16:55
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    "And as I understand it, the request for open alternatives was for the sheets themselves" - Yes, that is correct. We already have the hardware - if there are open source / libre sheets that could go with the hardware that would be a good alternative. – Rajano May 07 '14 at 17:08
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    @Rajano my link has free software to create the forms and scan them -- eg Udai OMR. Hardware and paper are the easy bits. Software is the tricky / expensive bit. – Moriarty May 07 '14 at 17:14